Carl Levin: Cheney’s lying about the CIA memos that allegedly prove torture works

posted at 7:35 pm on May 29, 2009 by Allahpundit

Really? So Cheney put his reputation on the line and started turning up on television everywhere to make the case that enhanced interrogation works, even though he secretly knows it doesn’t? And Obama has the smoking-gun memos in his possession and could destroy Cheney at any moment by declassifying them — and yet hasn’t? And Cheney knows that, and yet still he presses on?

He must be some poker player.

Levin, speaking at the Foreign Policy Association’s annual dinner in Washington on Wednesday, said an investigation by his committee into detainee abuse charges over the use of the techniques — now deemed torture by the Obama administration — “gives the lie to Mr. Cheney’s claims.”

The Michigan Democrat told the crowd that the two CIA documents that Cheney wants released “say nothing about numbers of lives saved, nor do the documents connect acquisition of valuable intelligence to the use of abusive techniques.”

“I hope that the documents are declassified, so that people can judge for themselves what is fact, and what is fiction,” he added…

“Cheney’s world view, which so dominated the Bush years and dishonored our nation, gained a little traction last week — enough to persuade me to address it head-on here tonight,” Levin said. “I do so because if the abusive interrogation techniques that he champions, the face of which were the pictures of abuse at Abu Ghraib, if they are once more seen as representative of America, our security will be severely set back.”

That’s an outright smear, of course, addressed by Cheney himself in his AEI speech last week. Bush backed him up today too, declining to knock Obama but reasserting that “the information we got saved lives.” Exit question: Now that Levin’s on board, we have bipartisan agreement. How about declassifying those memos, champ?

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As far as our collective honor is concerned, I would think that allowing Saddam Hussein to break his agreements with us, kill his own people, bribe UN security council members and turn a humanitarian aid program into a slush fund…would have done a little something to our honor. I would think the US Senate passing the Iraqi Liberation Act overwhelmingly and then doing nothing to liberate Iraq would have made us look like liars and frauds….but then people like strangelet have an entirely different view of honor than I do.

As far as our collective honor is concerned, I would think that allowing Saddam Hussein to break his agreements with us, kill his own people, bribe UN security council members and turn a humanitarian aid program into a slush fund…would have done a little something to our honor. I would think the US Senate passing the Iraqi Liberation Act overwhelmingly and then doing nothing to liberate Iraq would have made us look like liars and frauds….but then people like strangelet have an entirely different view of honor than I do.

Carl Levin is a point of reference for what? This is so easy it’s embarrassing. Levin knows the democrats will not release the true documents of what happened with waterboarding. They only release the pieces that reinforce their position. Levin is telling an absolute lie that will never be known.

Every now and then you just might want to take a glance at a news site that isn’t, well, moonbat-inclined. You might be better-informed. (I don’t count this one, since you seem to come here mainly to regurgitate what you’ve gathered from the moonbat sites.)

As for your displaying your ignorance again about the Iraqis hating us, I was wondering how many times you have been there? Or were you just getting your information from a CNN/Times bogus poll?

My son has been deployed there twice, and both times he came back with a completely different perspective than the polling data of lefty media outlets. Strangely, he said the Iraqis are thankful the Americans troops are there, tossed out the murderous Saddam and are helping every day to rebuild their country. While it is true they want our troops to leave ASAP, they do not want them out too soon and they have come to learn that our troops are not invasive murderers there for nation building, rather they are there to keep the peace, restore an operational infrastructure ….. and then move on. So contrary to your uninformed opinion, the Iraqis do not have a problem with our troops amidst their people.

Now that’s according to someone who spent nearly a combined two years on the ground there, so maybe, just maybe, he has a better pulse on what’s happeniong over there than ignorant little you, and your lefty friend Andrew Sullivan. His take is factual, yours is poll driven.

So, Levin’s state is going down the toilet and he’s squawking about a former VP who’s putting his reputation on the line by telling Americans the truth about methods of interrogation that saved unknown numbers of lives. He should be spending every waking minute of his miserable existence doing all he can to get his state solvent.

I’m a grrl, and an admirer of Dr. Kilcullen and General Petraeus.
I think your son is a noble, good guy and a loyal soldier.
But the truth is, he didn’t need to be there.
It was a war of choice.
And given that the Iraqis wrote sharia law into their constitution so that Iraq is an islamic state, was it worth the cost in blood and treasure?

Closing the military prison at Guantanamo Bay would purge the U.S. of a symbol used by enemies to divide the nation, the head of the U.S. Central Command said Friday.
Army Gen. David Petraeus said the U.S. military is “beat around the head and shoulders” with images of detainees held in Guantanamo, the facility in Cuba President Barack Obama has vowed to close. He said closing Guantanamo and ensuring detainees are dealt with by an appropriate judicial system would bolster the nation’s war effort in Afghanistan and Iraq.
“I do believe very strongly that we should live our values,” he said. “Generations of soldiers have fought to defend those values, and we should not shrink from living them, from operationalizing them, on the battlefield.”

And given that the Iraqis wrote sharia law into their constitution so that Iraq is an islamic state, was it worth the cost in blood and treasure?

strangelet on May 30, 2009 at 7:16 PM

That’s what happens when you have a democracy, the people decide how they want to be governed. What should we have done, insist they all convert to Christianity?

Freedom often comes at a high price. Was it worth it? Ask the Iraqis, their human toll of sacrifice was far greater than ours.

That does not diminish the heartache we have for our fallen soldiers. We can take some comfort knowing their sacrifice saved the lives of hundreds of thousands, here and abroad.

So to use your word, indeed, theirs is a noble cause.

“But the truth is, he didn’t need to be there.”

He chose to serve his country and follow orders from his Commander in Chief. There were no caveats in his contract. He is proud to serve and not ashamed of America or apologetic for America …… unlike our current president.

You sillie bint, it wasn’t our bidness. 4,228 american soldiers have died so far.
And the Iraqis hate us and 46% of them want us to move up the withdrawal date.
And just wait until this hits the fan.

strangelet on May 30, 2009 at 1:58 PM

There you go again….

You sillie bint,

If you ever make a rational point, it will be better recieved if you spell it correctly; this site is largely populated by thinking adults.

it wasn’t our bidness. 4,228 american soldiers have died so far.

If you don’t think 17 UN resolutions made it our business, fine. How about 100,000 dead Kurds, (counting just two and hundreds of thousands of other deaths at Sadaams’ hands? Knowing that he was likely to turn the country over to his murderous sons, should we have done nothing?

And the Iraqis hate us and 46% of them want us to move up the withdrawal date.

Surely, some do hate us; many others do not, and have viewed us as an ally, and a friend. You should spend some time with returning soldiers, and ask them how they were viewed by Iraqis.

As others here have suggested, read from some non-ultra-liberal sources, and improve your understanding of the world.

massrighty, why not Rwanda? Why not Dafur?
Are we supposed to be the Superawesome World Police?
Hate to break it to you, but we relly cant afford it.
Bush threw our economy into the crapper and spent a cool trillion on a war of choice.

I support the war. It was a good choice. It should have been fought before 911, not after, but that was the fault of Bush’s father and his father’s advisors including Powell.

The economy was in the crapper before the war, and social programs were the the first cause, and global economic realignment, facilitated by both Clinton, and Bush was the second cause, and the coming demise of the baby boomer population was the third cause

Our government and unstitutions like the auto unions set up an unsustainable set of entitlements

Our globalization broke the economic cycle as manufacturers were set up in Asia, and Americans purchased cheap Asian goods at high American prices, while the Asians purchased as little as possible from America, so the money did not circulate back to America, breaking the money flow for jobs, and therefore credit

The baby boomers have hit the skids, and they have more houses to sell than there are people to buy so housing would have dropped 20 percent in a perfect economy leading to a mortgage bust in perfect times. The main boomer crash is yet to come on top of the current bust

The war was cheap compare to what it preserved. The prior gulf war could be considered to have wasted money because it had to be re fought. Clinton’s Kosovo war was also a money drain and strategic loss as non muslim majorities were pushed aside and islamofascists regained their ancient Balkan foothold. The Balkans are now stable because we islamicized one part, destroyed the economy of the other part, and maintain it as a dead zone

We will never know if 911 could have been prevented but the incomplete resolution of the first gulf war, the global encouragement of islamists in the interest of gaining oil to fund the global shipping cycle, and the encouragement of the Taliban by China and others in the interest of destroying the American hegemony fed the confidence of the islamo fascists. On the week of 911, China signed an non agression agreement with the Taliban in return for support and training.

Bush’s war moved into the two or three critical regions to affect the islamofascist spread, nuclear Pakistan being the third facilitator.

It was our moneyed-class used of China for short term gain exactly as our population would need to liquidate assets for old age that sunk the ship and left the next generation stranded.

This is classic Carl Levin. The documents “say nothing about the number of lived saves”?
How could they possibly know the number? They would have to know how many people would have died in an attack they prevented.

I am so embarrassed that this assclown represents my state.
calabrese

Good point!

I think we will have to apply Obama’s (jobs saved ) math to this.

Number of Americans Killed on 911, lets say 2500, cuz not all killed on 911 were in fact Americans.